The twenty-two home-delivered newspapers and many magazines that greeted me after my week-long island retreat, offered scores of opportunities for sighting religious news. I'll bypass them and return to a topic Sightings has treated several times before: numbering Hispanic Catholics in the United States.

Europeans are having fits about the place of religion in Europe-as-Europe, and what they fight about may throw light on American discontents. In last Friday's Wall Street Journal (July 11), Brandon Mitchener in "Birth of a Nation?

Northwestern University had an outstanding football team in the early years of the 20th century known as the Fighting Methodists, the name was later changed to the less colorful but more collegiate-sounding Wildcats. The Fighting Methodists, however, may soon be making a dramatic comeback, not on the football field but inside the church itself.

Recently, an image of the Virgin Mary appeared in the window of a Massachusetts hospital prompting 25,000 visitors. The hospital took no official position as to the authenticity of the apparition, but tried their best to accommodate the pilgrims who were regularly gathering in their parking lot. The Boston archdiocese was contacted for help. Cameramen and news reporters soon followed.

"'Jesus box' exposed as fake." This was the headline of a CNN.com story appearing on June 18 (and on the "ticker" of the cable network's Headline News that evening). The director of the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA), Shuka Dorfman, had announced the findings of a 12-member panel that, while the "James ossuary" itself is ancient, the inscription on it is a modern fake.

In a society that seems intent on subjecting every institution and daily practice to methodical cost-benefit analysis, the cadences of the marriage vow in the Book of Common Prayer are beginning to sound radical: ". . .

Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Buber, Baillie, and Berdyaev were some of the "B" titans who towered fifty years ago, but my part of my generation cut our theological teeth on another, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As exemplars, Catholics then had Thomas Merton, the Jews had Abraham Joshua Heschel, and we Protestants had Bonhoeffer.